Automatically convert and import videos into iTunes

macrumors newbie

While waiting for the real heroes to come out with an AppleTV 3 jailbreak, I started looking around for alternatives. My goal was simple: I wanted to be able to play all of my movies (located on a LAN server) on my AppleTV3.

To do so, i needed to convert all my movies to .mp4, import them into iTunes and constantly repeat this process to keep the library up to date. Yurk! Lazy as i am, i ended up writing a small application (iWatch) to do it for me. It:

1) Watches a number of folders (no limit, can be spread across drives).
2) On change:
a) Imports compitable .mp4 files into the iTunes library.
b) Converts other video files to .mp4 (using HBs AppleTV 3 preset) and adds them to the iTunes library on completion.

My question is now, if there is any similar (free) solution available already? If there is, i'll just let iWatch live a quiet life on my server - otherwise I thought about sharing

thread startermacrumors newbie

macrumors newbie

TheDareDevil: Instead of converting all my movies to MP4's, I found an alternative to watch my movies / TV shows using my Apple TV 3. You do however need another iDevice such as iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. And, you will need to purchase an app called Air Video. With Air Video you can connect to your server(s) and play the movie on your iDevice. While playing use airplay to transfer the movie on your TV via the ATV3. It is extremely easy and failry good quality . I play avi's/MKV's/MP4's mostly.

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